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False allegations: a stain on justice

Scarcely a week goes by without a news report of a falsely accused man belatedly achieving justice. Too little attention to date has been given to the plight of the falsely accused. Now, it seems the tide is turning. This is long overdue.

We have all heard it said that “the process is the punishment”. In my experience the investigation is an even worse punishment (especially if you are innocent and have no idea why you are being investigated in the first place — the identity of the complainant is “protected” by virtue of being a member of one of our Official “victim groups”, and the complaint itself is kept secret except to investigators and your accuser and cohorts).

In my own case it took more than 20 years to more or less figure out what was going on — my Access to Information requests were routinely denied. After years of racking my brain here’s what I think happened after being falsely accused:

– after a marital dispute my fanatical ex-spouse had some Church friends write some “to whom it may concern” letters falsely accusing me of “planning a terrorist attack” while working overseas.
– the letter was circulated (without my knowledge at the time) and a copy was given to the local Canadian Embassy of the host country where I worked.
– upon return to Canada naturally I was put under surveillance, baited and stalked by various Canadian agencies, including Social agencies who automatically associate “terrorism” with mental illness. So now I was not only presumably a “terrorist” but likewise presumably “dangerously mentally ill”.
– every attempt to get the issue into court on my part in order to clear my name was deliberately obstructed.
– the result was complete destruction of my reputation, career and family and no chance of working for a living again in Canada free from harassment. Without ever going to court, without ever being charged with anything or evidence presented for “terrorism”, no court-ordered mental health evaluations etc. — everything purely based on the word of my accuser and her hearsay cohorts.

And that, in a nutshell, is how the justice system currently works in Canada if you are accused by someone who is a member of an Officially-recognized victim-group and there’s no evidence to back up the accusation. You will be “neutralized” just in case the false accusation might be true.

bargogx1

Guilty until proven innocent. Like many things involving the government, the exact opposite of how it’s supposed to be.

El Martyachi

Plenty of people fall through the cracks. And the cracks aren’t getting any smaller.

Norman_In_New_York

I too was falsely accused of felonious conduct by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and it took six years to clear my name even after Spitzer had to resign from the governorship in disgrace.

Mine was under this country’s Liberal gov of the day. And I can’t produce a name — the Libs regularly deny access to information requests in this country, even to journalists. It’s against Legislation but they do it anyway.

bargogx1

Easily fixed. Just make the penalty for making a false accusation the same as the maximum penalty the accused could have received had they been found guilty, and incidents of false accusations will drop like a stone.

tom_billesley

One paragraph stood out for me.

Something seems to have gone badly wrong in the UK’s criminal justice system. It is in thrall to former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘believe the victim’ approach. Both the UK police and the Crown Prosecution Service habitually display an exaggerated deference to complainants’ accounts in sex cases. They appear to regard this as an overriding moral imperative. Inevitably, this clouds their judgement.

What has been happening with allegations of sex crime is the same as what is now happening with allegations of hate crime and it has gone further to prosecution based not on evidence but on the perception of the self-identifying “victim”.

Donald Best is an Access to Justice and Anti-corruption advocate. A former Toronto Police Sergeant (Detective), he spent years in deep-cover investigations against organized crime, corrupt police and public officials.

In 2010 while traveling abroad from Canada, he was convicted of Civil Contempt of Court in a civil case costs hearing he did not know was taking place. He was convicted in his absence on the provably false testimony of several senior lawyers and spent 63 days in prison – all in solitary confinement.

The courts refused to listen to Mr. Best’s voice recordings that prove his innocence and the lawyers’ perjury. The courts refused to allow Mr. Best to cross-examine the lawyers who provided the false testimony used to convict him.

The courts did not allow Mr. Best to appeal his conviction unless he first paid almost a third of a million dollars in costs that were previously awarded to the lawyers on the foundation of their false testimony.

Due to that financial barrier to justice, Mr. Best was unable to appeal. His conviction and prison time stand as a warning to all Canadians of how a corrupt cabal has undermined both the legal profession and our justice system.

Hard Little Machine

And this is why I would happily walk by any child or woman being injured, assaulted, raped or otherwise brutalized. Not my concern. Sorry.